Читать книгу Environmental Political Theory - Steve Vanderheiden - Страница 21

The third kind of response to the challenge of ecological limits, and the only one that takes seriously the precautionary response called for by the science of environmental change, as well as the social and political ideals upon which modern liberal democracies are founded and toward which they in their best moments continue to aspire, seeks mutual accommodation between the sustainability ideal and those other existing ideals that it disrupts and must transform – but need not necessarily displace. It faults the business-as-usual response for underestimating the disruption posed by sustainability imperatives, and the eco-fortress for overestimating it and thus failing to maintain tenable versions of existing social and political ideals. Recognizing the need for sustainable transition in our institutions, infrastructure, practices, and ideas, this response meets the challenge of ecological limits through constraints imposed by (updated and reimagined) critical social and political ideals, ensuring that the transition it recommends is guided by imperatives of justice as well as sustainability.

Failing to maintain the material conditions necessary for society to treat its members justly and to govern itself democratically makes business as usual self-undermining, as justice and democracy are both threatened by worsening scarcity, while failing to maintain social conditions and institutions necessary to promote respect for, and protect the dignity of, persons and peoples undermines the normative basis for human society itself. Doing both – maintaining defensible versions of key social and political ideals, but making these compatible with the maintenance of those ideals over time – comprises the third response of the just transition. Here, “just” serves as a kind of shorthand for the mix of ideals to be discussed in chapters 3 through 10, with the ideal of justice incorporating the seven others in various ways. For the purposes of the next eight chapters, this response aims to maintain some conceptions of the social and political ideals to be surveyed in those chapters. In the concluding chapter, we shall return to the question of what the just transition might look like, or how sustainability interacts with those other ideals. First, however, we must turn our attention to those eight ideals.